King Vidor (1894-1982 and Henry King (1888-1982) were both Southern men, and hailed from Texas and Virginia respectively. They were polar opposites in style. King's films decidedly more innocuous and charming, with harmony and a leisurely outdoors quality - more often than not, rendering a nostalgic sense of yesteryear, although it seldom revealed a strong, personal quality. An exception was King's silent independently made masterpiece Tol'able David (1921), it was a rural tale of love, loss (including the love of a pet) and violence in provincial Virginia, filmed with great simplicity and with many autobiographical intonations from King's own childhood recollections. David was portrayed by Richard Barthelmess who just happened to be D.W. Griffith's golden son; but in the other films that King bestowed upon the screen - such significant discoveries as Ronald Colman (The White Sister,1926) and Gary Cooper (The Winning of Barbara Worth,1923). His family melodrama was the weepy Stella Dallas (1926) which was successfully remade by Vidor in the year 1937. Another of Henry King's memorable entries was a pre-Hays State Fair, from 1933 it would be the sole adaptation that was nominated for an Academy Award.
Unlike King, Vidor was rarely content for any long periods of time, certainly not of his Modus operandi to be any old complacent resident studio director of assignments, though he would share King's preference for working specifically on location. As a result of Vidor's aspiration to undertake personal projects and the contrary necessity of earning a living with commercial chores, his career was distinctly shambolic. His stint at Metro between the years 1922 and 1931 was one of his most achieved periods, namely his anti-war entry The Big Parade (1925), which starred John Gilbert, and his astute study of the everyman in 1928's The Crowd, was where an unknown actor in the name of James Murray played the archetypal big-city office stiff.
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| No Ayres about Lew and Janet Gaynor as teenagers (ish) in love in Henry King's 1933 pre-code wower State Fair |
Having started out with huge ambitions, the American preoccupation with success, he can only survive as a typical member of the crowd. Vidor would conclude his silent-movie career the same year with two zippy Marion Davies comedies. The Party and a skit on Hollywood and Gloria Swanson with (and there really weren't any people like these) Show People. He then made his first talkie which also happened to be mostly dubbed, an ambitious all-black cast melodrama; Hallelujah (1929), an earnest attempt by a Southerner to depict the life of black people as he knew it from his own personal experiences.
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| John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman on board in King Vidor's Bardely's the Magnificent (1926) |
Vidor's efforts to depict the realities of American life remained within the confines of convention and styles of fiction, even if he endeavored to extend their bounds. But it was possible also to be a creative artist in the field of documentary, though few in America would attempt such a feat.
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| King Vidor having a smoke. |
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| Henry King - no pipe |
*Cover shot : Barbara Stanwyck and Anne Shirley in King Vidor's winning weeper Stella Dallas (1937)